


home is where you rest your head

by bloomerie



Series: buttercup [2]
Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Bisexual Jaskier | Dandelion, F/F, F/M, Female Jaskier | Dandelion, Hurt Jaskier | Dandelion, Identity Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:41:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22308841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloomerie/pseuds/bloomerie
Summary: Jaskier, throughout the years, contemplates her sense of others, herself, and home.
Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Series: buttercup [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1599100
Comments: 23
Kudos: 728





	home is where you rest your head

**Author's Note:**

> I did indeed make this into a series. Enjoy?
> 
> Also, the Continent is very much Polish, but since I'm ridiculous and decided to showcase class differences through dialect, I was obviously going to use what I know how to write, so what's here is based more or less accurately on what can be found in the (particularly historic) UK. Kerack is West Country, Redania is Wales, and further north is Scotland, but varying strengths of them depending on the person or area (a pattern I actually established in the last fic). I work with UK dialects as part of my academic research. Like I said, I'm a ridiculous person.

A fisherman’s daughter returns to her father’s village on the first day of autumn, just shy of fifteen years since she walked the long road away with no company but her own. Then, she was Julia Eliaszowska of Morzawa, a peasant child with quick hands, quick feet, and a quicker mouth that earned her no prospects in life but a future husband who had could never hope to improve her station; now, she is Jaskier the Songstress, an envy and desire of all the Northern Kingdoms, and she has not come alone. 

“I thought she was a lady from Oxenfurt,” she hears the Princess Cirilla say behind her back when she steps from her and Geralt’s sides to venture down a lane choked in wilting weeds. 

“You can’t always believe what you hear,” Geralt answers, but whatever Ciri answers is lost to distance as Jaskier turns a corner onto the narrow road that holds what was once her home. 

In her youth, Morzawa was not a village that surrendered easily to stillness or silence. Come summer, even darkness needed to wrestle the sky above it into submission, and on clear nights with a luminous moon, that was too much of a struggle. Her brother played the flute at odd hours and her closest neighbour, Myszow, preferred to practice his fiddle in the early morn. The sea is too rough to quiet, the crash of it a constant ambience that melded to the call of dockworkers and the seamen, or the seamen and their wives. Friends and neighbours and bitter rivals caterwauled to each other on the streets. Cicadas hummed in the warmest months and in the coldest, fires crackled in the yawning ovens and village square. 

Morzawa gifted Julia a voice and the words to accompany it, but Jaskier is the one who learned the use them. 

When the plague swept through, the village folk hadn’t known that Kerack had just fallen to Cidaris, and so could expect no aid. They died believing the lord on whose land the village sat had finally seen fit to abandon them, unaware he’d so recently been assassinated in his sleep. Julia left to find her brother with that news caught on her tongue, burning through her thoughts, and didn’t learn the truth until she reached Oxenfurt. She hated Kerack for opening their gates, and she hated Cidaris for the ruination of her people. She eradicated from her voice any connection to the land that gifted it to her. She swore she would never return. 

At eighteen, Jaskier accepted her first performance in a Cidarian baron’s court housed on what was once Keracki soil, and slept with his son when the man slipped a hand in her dress. 

But this is her first return _home._ Her first return to Morzawa. At thirteen, she didn’t truly think her entire community was dead. Now, as she takes in the husks of what used to be houses, shops, and ships, she’s forced to accept the reality that even those who did survive ran as she had. There must have been some others, she reasons. After all, she sees too few skeletons, and the dead don’t make a habit of burying themselves. 

She stops in front of what was once her father’s home. Generously she might call it a shack—one room, smaller than Annarietta’s smallest watercloset, collapsing at the roof and narrow porch, its windows shattered, its door gone. Inside she sees no dust suspended on sunlight, for no sunlight touches there. The house is not a home. It’s her father’s tomb. 

Perhaps, she thinks, it’s Julia Eliaszowska’s tomb as well. 

Though she tells herself to enter, she can’t bring herself beyond the porch’s first step. It groans beneath her foot, which is encased in worn travelling boots made of good quality leather half-hidden beneath the skirts of a linen dress that costs more than her father earned in a year. Often, with one performance, she earns as much. She’s been paid ten times or more for a single night’s performance in lordly halls or royal courts—a request which has, more than once, been a veiled excuse to bed her. 

What an expensive whore she’s made. 

After a moment, she removes her foot from the entrance of familial tomb, and changes course for the shore. It roars at her, the grey waves crashing over the rocks and collapsed jetty. Only a few decrepit boats remain moored, still clinging postmortem, to stakes in the makeshift harbour. A periwinkle sky stretches out above it from the treetops to the hazy horizon, cloudless but for the opaque shimmer gauzing the sun. At the water’s edge, she strips of her boots and stockings, and ties her skirts above her knees. She doesn’t think about Toussaint’s gentle blue sea, nor Yennefer’s promise on the beach of it for a _life_ that Nilfgaard forced her to break at Sodden Hill. Julia is dead, as is her family, and the woman Jaskier loved. 

She walks as far into the shallows as her shins, though the spray and whitewater attack her dress regardless. It wets her loose hair, darkening the pale brown to a nearly-black. Sometimes her eyes are this colour, and sometimes they’re the shade of an ocean found much further south than here. Her babcia, who was born on southern shores, told her, “A maid with eyes like yours cannae ’ave no fate of staying. They eyes bist restless, mark me.”

Well. Babcia wasn’t wrong. Jaskier will be restless until she dies.

As the late autumn day gives way to the creeping start of the long sunset, Geralt joins her, barefoot with his trousers hiked to his thighs. Ciri is a little ways off, in view but distant enough to allow them some privacy. Though Yen might be gone, Jaskier still has him. What a tragic side effect of a triangular love.

“It’s been an hour,” he says, stopping beside her. “You haven’t moved.”

The waves roll over her, cold, but she’s far too numb to feel the bite. “I guess it’s been a while since I felt this sea,” she says, which is an answer that isn’t really answer at all. 

As one, they surrender to the silence Morzawa is meant to lack until he, before her, says, “So. This is where you’re from.”

She laughs, the sound high and bubbly and short. “Oh, Geralt,” she says in her perfect perfect perfect _high bred_ Redanian accent. “Haven’t you heard? I’m a lady. I’m the cousin of a lord from Letterhove, who holds house in Oxenfurt. I was born from a batch of buttercups in White Orchard fully grown and come from nowhere at all.”

Four years ago, he confessed he wasn’t actually from Rivia, but if he’s angry that she didn’t return the favour, he’s kind enough not to show it. Technically, she never said she was from Oxenfurt either. She never said she was from anywhere. 

In truth, she is Jaskier of Nowhere, daughter of No One, and prefers it as such. 

“Why now?” he asks instead, so she shrugs, and answers, “Because Yen is gone, and I can go wherever I want, because everywhere people want me, but all I’ve ever wanted is her and you. I’m dramatic. Returning here seemed appropriately tragic.”

He smiles wryly. “Sounds like you,” he says, but then the smile disappears, and for the first time ever, he adds, “There’s more.”

Clearly, Ciri’s done him wonders. Jaskier doesn’t appreciate it. “Oh, Geralt,” she says again, and sends him a smile of her own. “I be wambling anywhen, but I ’ave naught a place to my name, I tell’ee, and—nae I a youn’un now, yet zat as ever—I be getting tired, despite what chinny reckons I writ to please the crowds. So where can I goes to but my tata’s home?” 

He stares at her, openly, with more expression than she expected, though perhaps she should have, as it’s not every day that someone like her switches into _thic_ dialect. “Fuck,” he says, then looks behind him to the village, to the ramshackle shells of a place destroyed and rebuilt countless times since the world began, or so the old local legend went. “What happened, Jask?”

“Plague,” she says, shoulders dropping, “and war. Poverty. Famine. Exploitation of the peasantry. Drowner attacks that went unchecked. If you can think it up, it happened. Morzawa died a slow and painful death, but sickness did them in.”

“Did Yen know?” 

She shakes her head. 

His fingers find her arm, the touch a question first, and when she doesn’t pull from it, they grip her. “We need to leave,” he tells her. “You don’t want to stay here after dark.”

No, she doesn’t. Morzawa played set to her nightmares long before she saw it like this, decomposing from exposure and silence. “No one here would recognise me,” she says before he leads her to the dry sand, so quiet that it’s more to herself than to him, “even if they had lived. I don’t—well, I don’t think I look so different, maybe, but I’m not _her_ anymore. I could never be who I am now if anyone but you found out that I’m not really Jaskier of Oxenfurt, or some yellow flower field.”

As a child, she stank of rotting fish and the ocean, and her hair was coarse and stiff from a relentless wind saturated with sea salt. Her dresses were restitched from her late mother’s and she spoke like any average janner child. In summer she wore no shoes and at thirteen, starvation kept her trapped at ten. Her body didn’t begin its bleed for another two years, after she was already a legal woman. No one from Morzawa would reconcile the memory of _that girl_ , who was just a skeleton wrapped in skin and earthen rags, with Jaskier, who may still weigh less than eight stones, but dresses in pastel linens or jeweled silks and entwines ribbons in her soft hair. She talks like a Redanian lady and eats expensive sweets off painted porcelain plates, and will never have to fear a marriage with the seventh son of a shepherd who hails from an equally small village just past the forest from hers. 

With Geralt, she walks away from the water and back to her boots. He doesn’t tell her that there’s no shame in reinventing herself, but she thinks it’s what he means he presses a kiss to the top of her head. Ciri shoots over to them as he pulls away, not as occupied by the tide pools as she pretended, and eyes them curiously. Perhaps she isn’t used to outward affection, or perhaps she simply hadn’t anticipated seeing it come from a witcher. 

“We’re leaving?” she says, gaze sweeping from Geralt to Jaskier and back again. 

He only harrumphs, so she smiles thinly, and says, “We shouldn’t stay here long. A place like this will have too many ghosts.”

That isn’t a metaphor. Morzawa’s slow and painful death was far from clean, and as the sun sinks closer to the horizon, what wraiths must remain trapped on its muddied streets will emerge seeking a meal. Geralt leads them back to the horses, the three tethered in a shielded copse nearby, and they ready quickly. After Jaskier mounts, she peeks behind her through the rough trunks and colouring foliage to what is visible of her childhood—the meeting hall, taller than the other clustering buildings, with its stone chimney split in two, and beside the Carp and Bream’s clay tile roof punched through with holes. Then Geralt clicks his tongue and heels, urging Roach onwards, with Ciri doing the same seconds later, so Jaskier turns her attention forward, and follows them away from the water and into the wood.

Eliasz Eliaszow dies on the hottest day of his country’s final summer. 

Despite the heat and oppressive humidity, a fire blazes in the oven, kept aflame in an effort to keep him warm. His daughter burns from it, her skin sticky from perspiration and her hair adhered to her skin, where she dozes. He lies stretched on the narrow bed, decomposing long before his last breath leaves his rotting lungs, and she sits propped beside him against the splintering wall, her arms folded on the mattress and her head pillowed into them. Her back aches. Fatigue eats at her. Thankfully, her stomach has gone empty for too long for her to feel any hunger. 

When he dies, she doesn’t notice. He has no parting words to spew out to the roof above them, to trap in these four walls. Outside, the world continues turning—the sea crashes on the shore with its usual ferocity and the sun climbs to high noon in the clear sky—but here, his death transforms this sheltered space from _home_ to _grave_. 

An hour later, that’s how his daughter wakes: to discover she has slept by a dead man’s unmoving chest. 

Morzawa, the only home she has known, groans with grief and sickness when she steps outside her four walls. Somehow, she remains healthy, despite her days spent as nursemaid to a dying man beside a fire that should have fostered illness. Jagoda, the wise woman, spat at her a fortnight prior that she must be a witch to still be hale, but then the healer too succumbed to plague. Now there’s only a non-witch in a homespun dress who knows she can expect no help. 

She removes a shovel from the village’s communal tool shed, left unlocked as always at the head of the path leading to the main jetty, and hikes back to her house. Days at summer’s height stretch past reasonable hours, so she has more than enough light to dig a shallow grave in the small, unyielding vegetable patch she attempted to upkeep behind the house. It isn’t deep, but her arms shake too strongly for her to make a proper job of it. After a brief rest, where she sticks the shovel like a walking staff into the dirt and leans heavily into the shaft, she undertakes the arduous, unclean task of dragging her father’s body out the house’s rear door and into the grave. The hole isn't quite long enough. When she covers him again, his toes peek like new shoots from the disturbed earth. 

With that task done, she stumbles down the sand to the sea, where she bathes herself of the filth and the dead, clothes and all. Scavenger birds circle among the gulls overhead, bloodthirsty in anticipation. Soon there will be drowners, and after, those hungry creatures made from corpses or departed souls. Her body aches at a level deeper than her father’s meagre grave, but she knows she cannot stay the night. Even if there are other survivors in Morzawa, it likely won’t be long until they also die. 

But she has a brother in Oxenfurt. All she knows of the city is that it’s south, but she can ask for directions along the way. So, with that decided, she gathers what she needs and, still dripping wet from the sea that so thoroughly defined her life, she leaves her village in hopes of somewhere new to call her home. 

Within days of journeying together, Ciri pesters Jaskier with questions that no one else ever bothered to ask. “What were your parents like?” she says the first night, and from then: “Did you know your grandparents? Do you have any siblings? Where did you learn to sing and dance and play a lute? Why do you sound Redanian if you’re not? Where did you learn to write?”

That final one, asked a week after Jaskier joins Ciri and Geralt, is, admittedly, a bit insulting, but she does her best to answer all the girl’s questions. “My father taught my brother and me,” she says as she passes Ciri the goatskin pouch freshly filled with water. The clear stream bubbles merrily behind them, churning over slippery, moss-covered rocks and already frozen in places despite how early it is in the season. “To be honest, I don’t know where he learned. My father didn’t talk much about his own family or his life before he met my mother. She was the one from the village—my father came there from a different one when they married, which isn’t normal. Usually the wife goes to the husband.” 

“Did you like growing up there?” Ciri asks as they trek back up the long sloping hill to the night’s camp, where hopefully Geralt has begun cooking their dinner. Earlier he caught a couple of squirrels and Jaskier found some apples, which won’t make a feast, but none of them need that much. The sun meanders past the distant mountains, dropping below its peak, so in the autumn wood’s premature twilight, Ciri’s hair glows like a sheath of winter moonlight. 

After a minute, Jaskier answers, “I don’t know. At the time, I didn’t know anything else. Did you enjoy being a princess?”

Ciri frowns. “I should have,” she says, tone almost guilty, almost confessional. “I know that now. Before though, I tended to be...bored. My grandmother and grandfather were always busy and the only people my own age in the castle were servants, who never wanted to play. Unless I managed to sneak away from the guard, I only ever had my tutor on most days. Mousesack. You knew him. I know because he mentioned you.”

Startled, Jaskier says, “He did?”

“Yes,” Ciri says. “Oh, almost every court affair the bard would start a song by saying it was ‘property of Jaskier the Songstress’—if I didn’t hear it on the street first. I thought you must be _ancient_ , and said so, so Mousesack told that you performed at the castle the same year I was born, when you were hardly older than a girl.” 

At sixteen years the girl’s senior, Jaskier still must seem ancient enough. “I didn’t speak to him much,” she says as the first smell of woodsmoke and their dinner drifts to them on the early evening breeze, “but I’m sorry for your loss, Ciri. For all of it. And, about the boredom, before. Never let anyone tell you what you should or shouldn’t feel. Anyone can be lonely. That’s true for peasant girls and princesses and witchers alike.” 

With a small smile, Ciri says, “You think he gets lonely too?”

Jaskier doesn’t answer, because they breach the top of the hill, but the scathing look Geralt sends her way from over the spit with the roasting squirrels proves he heard them. She tosses him the third waterskin, which he catches with ease. “Chart our course yet for tomorrow?” she asks with a quick grin, rounding the fire to sit against the rock beside him. Ciri occupies her other side, having become attached to her much faster than Jaskier expected, as she assumed she would be the interloper to whatever relationship the two forged over their time alone. 

“We need coin,” Geralt says, frowning at the fire. “Tomorrow we’ll stop in the next village to see if anyone has a contract.”

“If there’s an inn or public house, I can perform,” Jaskier says, leaning without shame against him. By the time he kissed her on the cliff side in Skellige, he was already used to her casual touches. “To have a roof over our heads would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

Though Geralt’s answer is a noncommittal hmm, Ciri readily agrees. Jaskier doesn’t require four walls and a roof, even if she does prefer to have them both, but she doesn’t like Ciri sleeping on the open road. Even with Geralt here (for she _knows_ that she’s useless as protection on her own), it isn’t safe for a girl of twelve to spend so many nights under the stars. More monsters stalk the wood than those with tooth and claw, and many of them are far more persistent. Ciri is young. She shouldn’t be placed in that sort of risk. 

She falls asleep not long after dinner, before the sky is even true dark, her head in Jaskier’s lap. “She’s very sweet,” Jaskier says when she finishes her lullaby, looking down at the girl’s fine-boned face, all her sharp angles and lines. “She deserves better than instability.”

Unsurprisingly, all Geralt says is “That’s true.”

Bats, early to wake tonight, swoop low overhead, before diving out of sight into the canopy. Stars and the moon shine, pale and silver, in the dusky blue. Over the past week, Jaskier’s done her best to answer all of Ciri’s questions—no, she didn’t know her mother, her father’s parents, or her grandfather, but her father and grandmother were good people, and her older brother, Jesion, had a disposition that could brighten anyone’s mood even on their worst day. They taught her to sing and dance, but the lute she learned from a minstrel in Oxenfurt, where yes, she _did_ intentionally change her accent. It was easier that way. 

Of course, she hadn’t told Ciri about the circumstances involved in acquiring her first lute, or how her life looked before she met Geralt, but there are some details no girl her age needs to know. 

“You should sleep,” he says, poking at the fire with a long stick. The movement is so familiar it tugs at her heart, because it’s simply dumb, really, that they let a single fight keep them apart for two full years. “We need to wake early.”

“Don’t we always?” He doesn’t answer. “Hold me?”

Though he doesn’t answer that, either, he wraps his arm around her without protest or hesitation, allowing her to settle more comfortably against his side. As she closes her eyes, she feels him turn his head, his nose pressed into her hair. This is how they sleep, then: Ciri nestled against Jaskier and Jaskier nestled against Geralt, the three exposed without roof or walls, but sheltered nonetheless in the safety of each other. 

In an inn a day’s ride from Rinde, a decrepit bard with a lustrous voice and drooping whiskers sings of a personal truth: home is what you choose, so long as it has it has a roof above your head.

“He’s trying too hard,” Jaskier says, eyeing the man from the usual back corner booth, where she sits supporting her weight without shame onto Geralt’s side. Despite that _Yennefer’s_ magic cure, a soul-deep exhaustion devours her, and now that the original adrenaline rush has passed, her voice has grown hoarse again. “No one in a place like this wants a song that...complicated.”

The melody is slow but rich, and, like the vocabulary, intended for a wealthy man’s hall. It’s not meant to lodge in the average farmer’s head, to stay with him into the following morning so he can still hum it under his breath while harvesting his crop. There’s a steady stream of conversation held above the performance, heralding a promised lack of coin at the end of it. 

If a djinn hadn’t rammed itself down her throat, Jaskier could have done better. 

Geralt doesn’t seem to notice, which is not unexpected. He hmms. She allows her head to fall more fully into his shoulder, her neck weak. Under her temple, his armour is too hard and the muscle beneath it not much better. The joint moves disquietingly against her check when he adjusts himself, but he doesn’t tell her to leave. Above them, in their shadowed corner’s timber gables, a nesting pigeon coos. That’s what this damned old bard is doing, she thinks. Cooing. 

At some point she must drift into a doze, because suddenly the bard is cooing about a prince who rode across seven rivers and seven mountains to rescue his lady love in a too-similar melody as his first number, and the innkeep is saying, “Is the lassie not well, Mr Witcher, sir?” very quietly on Geralt’s other side. “Aye,” says the woman. “I’ll fetch the child a spot of the stew and tea. Will ye be wanting some for yourself now, sir?”

Geralt’s answering “yes” and “thanks” rumbles through Jaskier’s ribs. Blearily, she blinks, and straightens as the woman waddles away, her skirts and greased apron dragging behind her. After a while, all innkeepers in village establishments look the same—the women wide hipped and heavy chested, the men scowling and thin faced. This one is fashioned from the same model. 

“Sorry,” Jaskier says, and rubs her eye with the back of her wrist as she shifts away from him to sit upright. “’M not sick. Just tired.”

“You haven’t eaten since we left Unterau.” Unterau was the town she found him in less than twelve hours before he went fishing for a magical cure for insomnia. “Rest after you eat.”

“I thought I was better,” she says as the old bard finishes with a long lingering low note, stands, and bows. He was so bland no one even bothers to throw rotten vegetables at him, and if she were feeling more of herself, she would pity him for that. “Why do I feel like someone ran me over with a cart?”

Frowning, Geralt glances at her sideways, and answers, “A healing sleep isn’t real. You’re human. You lost a lot of blood. You need food and rest. And water.” Nodding to the cup of it in front of her, he adds, “Drink.”

She does. It’s not terribly cold, but still sharp as glass when it slides down her throat. 

Defeated, the old bard slinks away from the corner he used for his performance to the door. Home is where you choose, so long as there’s a roof above your head. A common sentiment, probably, but not one Jaskier agrees with. She thought for a short while that Toussaint could be home, where she had Annarietta to shower her with affection and a room with not just a beautifully painted ceiling, but four sturdy walls. In the end, even that security—shelter, companionship, a steady income, guaranteed food—wasn’t enough to keep her tethered. 

Maybe she isn’t suited for a home. Maybe it’s just that home is an abstract concept, and even malicious djinn and equally malicious witches aren’t enough to stop her own personal truth: home can be a person, and hers is right beside her. 

The innkeep returns with two bowls of potato stew and a mug of tea. “Best to let it seep first, honeybee,” she says, placing the mug in front of Jaskier. “Mr Witcher, sir, just give us a shout if ye be needing more. The room is the last on the left up the stairs.”

“Thank you, mistress,” Jaskier says, and rubs her eye again. It’s no wonder the woman assumes she’s ill, considering she’s still wrapped in a travelling cloak to hide the handprint on her throat and blood staining her dress’ bodice. What a lovely dress this was, too. White silk embroidered with small daisies, and a yellow ribbon cinching the waist. Annarietta gifted it to her last month for her eighteenth birthday. 

Jaskier and Geralt finish their meal in silence, the humming talk from the other patrons a low background noise enshrouding them. The stew is tasteless and the tea not much better, but both are warm, which is nice. When they finish, she stands, intending to carry her own dishes back to the bar, but Geralt shoos her to stay put. That’s fine, really. Though she does feel better now that she has food in her stomach, getting to her feet too quickly did, embarrassingly enough, leave her head rushing. 

“Poor dear,” she hears the innkeep say. The woman is far too invested in her wellbeing for a stranger who hasn’t heard her sing. “White as death, she is.”

A second later, Geralt reappears, and helps her from the booth. Jaskier’s skirts snag, but she frees herself with a hard tug. It’s not as though the dress isn’t already beyond saving. To think a woman as well dressed as Yennefer of Vengerberg hadn’t bothered fixing Jaskier’s clothes along with her body. Then again, she only helped because she thought Jaskier was useful to her. _She saved your life_ , Geralt said before he ran into a collapsing building to save _her,_ then _fucked_ her, as though assistance for purely selfish gains should really constitute the gaining of a life debt. 

As Geralt leads her behind the bar through a door to the first floor, his hand steady between her shoulders, the old bard slips back in through the front, his face seemingly more haggard and beard more limp than earlier. They got the last room, the innkeep said when Geralt asked if they had anything (even just the stables) free, so should the man be looking for a home for the night, then he’s out of luck. 

“There’s a notice board in the square,” Geralt says after setting the packs on the floor beside the bed closest to the door. She peels away the travelling cloak and sits on the other, hand drifting to her sore, bruised throat as she glances out the window. Outside is grey, with a grey sky stretched over a village of grey clay building separated by grey streets. “I’ll check it. Sleep.”

In the darkened glass, she sees her reflection, her thin death-white face, her frizzing hair, the handprint a perfect match for his. Behind her, he’s just a smudge of white-black with his eyes two amber pinpricks. She looks away, looks back to him. One of his brows twitches. Those yellow eyes aren’t focused on her face, but her neck. On the bruise. 

Too exhausted to speak, she only nods. He hesitates, as though he means to add something more, before he turns and leaves. The key twists in the lock from the outside with a decisive _click_ in the same moment the clouds reach their limit, and release the rain to stampede down upon the roof. 

Yen peppers kisses, sunshine-light, to each freckle that marks a diagonal line from Jaskier’s hairline to the nap of her neck. “Come back to bed, Jask,” she says, voice low, sweet and saturated with promise. Her bare chest presses against Jaskier’s clothed back, her legs bent on either side, her arms tucked around her waist. 

Ordinarily, Jaskier’s easy enough to lead, but this is—well, this is a _homecoming._ She’s inspired. Across the magicked tent, a fire pops behind an ornate iron grate, keeping Yen warm and Jaskier more or less the same, despite the Skelliger blizzard battering the canvas exterior. Yen’s favourite silvery night robe, which she commandeered for the duration of composing her new ballad, finishes the task. “In a minute,” she says, distracted, as she dips the quill into the ink pot. She sits cross-legged on the bed with a slip of paper on her lap balanced on book. 

“I thought a year was a long time for humans.” Yen noses Jaskier’s hair below the bun she piled up with neat bow. The scent of lilac and gooseberries is overpowering. 

“Oh, shush,” she says, the corners of her mouth curling into a what feels like her first genuine smile in twelve long months. “I’m writing you an _actual_ love song. Do you like this for an opening? _What we poets dare to name romance is wont to bloom within the witch’s garden, where lilacs and lady’s do dance, and seek in sweet love solace from what the rose have done._ Of course, it will need work. Internal rhymes, for example, and a far better melody. Still. This is only the roughest of first drafts. I want it to be a folk song in the traditional sense. You deserve and will get a more complicated piece meant for royal courts, but there’s beauty in simplicity, too. A decent enough tune with decent lyrics can last, I don’t know. Possibly forever, I suppose.”

Without her realising, Yen had gone very still against her back. Jaskier feels the _pit-pat_ of her heart, steadier than her own. “You write your songs to last,” she says carefully. “A legacy.”

Surprised, Jaskier says, “You didn’t know?” and twists in her arms, meeting the intensity of Yen’s gaze. How breathtaking she is will never cease to steal the air from Jaskier’s lungs, regardless of how long it is until the other woman finally does leave her for good. “I thought you knew I was too vain not to want to leave one. A name like Jaskier will never stick—too many syllables—but my music might.”

There’s a beat where all Yen does is stare, eyes roving over her face, before she closes the narrow gap between them to kiss her soundly on the mouth, her black hair falling to curtain Jaskier’s face. She isn’t like Annarietta, who demanded Jaskier’s attention because she expected some type of allegiance, nor Geralt, who for all his gruffness made it certain she knew she could change her mind; rather, Yen’s form of love is a variable _attack_ . Everything she is pervades Jaskier’s senses so each heartbeat drums out a mantra of _mine mine mine._ Perhaps that’s the song in true. _For a kiss I shall at her feet lay my heart still beating, split my skin upon a thorn until I am bleeding, my last wish be that ’til I die she does keep me warm._

Behind its grate, the fire crackles and all around the tent, the blizzard rages on and on, harmless to them where they are in this seclusion of warmth upon the fur-covered bed. Jaskier is on her back, the robe open, as she hears the book and paper hit the floor. The scars on the other woman’s wrists, the ones they only spoke of once, brush her side when she finishes stripping her. I was desperate, she had said when she caught Jaskier looking. All women know of desperation, at least once, before the end.

That was three years ago, give or take a few months. Now, Yen says, “Even your name will last a thousand years.” Prophesies it, more like. She brushes her lips against Jaskier’s collar bone, who slides a hand into her thick hair. “I’ll make sure of it.”

Less than a year later, Jaskier waits in Yen’s Vengerberg shop when news comes of Sodden Hill and the fourteen mages who died there. “Yennefer is dead,” says the woman in the burgundy dress, who knew to come to Jaskier, even if Jaskier doesn’t know who she is. “I’m sorry.”

Humans aren’t meant to outlive mages, which is a truth Jaskier had long since come to accept, but Yen has—no, _had_ —never been one to follow the world’s expectations. That night, in her shop, Jaskier writes a song about a lark who mourns her raven lover, and within a month, hears it’s reached as far as Nilfgaard, those _fuckers_.

She doesn’t drink, but in that moment, wishes very dearly that she did.

To sooth Ciri’s nightmares, Jaskier first sings half-forgotten lullabies from her childhood, then comes to craft her own. Geralt makes no comment of it in the beginning, not until one chilled midnight after their reunion when the moon must be high behind the clouds and she’s so tired she had to struggle not to mumble her song. “You’re good with her,” he says, looking not at her but at Ciri, who curls into a self-protective ball on her bedroll between them. 

“Well,” Jaskier says, blinking through her exhaustion. Today’s trek was a hard one that the horses couldn’t complete with riders on their backs, so they undertook the worst of the incline leading the three by the reins, struggling through sharp bare branches and slippery fallen leaves. Ciri’s nightmare woke her as surely as it woke the girl. “I have one gift in life. It had to be useful for something other than earning coin.”

Geralt leans over to stir the coals, reigniting the dying fire. All around them in the underbrush, creatures and the wind scuttle, indistinguishable. “You’re good with children,” he says. The _you always have been_ goes unspoken, but heard nonetheless.

“Children are easy enough to charm with a whistle and a dance,” she answers, and doesn’t add her own final thought, which is, _and a pretty face._ Though she may not hold Yen’s ethereal magnetism, Jaskier acknowledges easily that men and women alike find her easy on the eyes. “You’re quite good with her too.” 

“It’s just the relief,” he says, not quite looking at her still. She suspects it’s more than that, but he won’t believe her if she insists. “Why did you never want one?”

Jaskier’s breath catches. Nearly a year ago, Yen asked her the same question. “I,” she starts, stumbles, then says, “I may be human but my lifestyle is still basically nomadic. I could never offer anything stable—no house or promise of security. Besides, the only people I've ever loved aren’t in a position to get me pregnant. Clearly. But I’d like to think we’re doing halfway decent with the one you’ve got. Why?”

“I thought you find someone else,” he answers, frowning. In the rekindled firelight, his yellow eyes glow flatly. “After.” 

“I did,” she says, folding her arms beneath her cloak. “I went back to Annarietta. Things were going swimmingly until Yen showed up. Now, well. Now this.”

“Annarietta,” he repeats. “Anna Henrietta? Duchess of Beauclair?”

“The very same.”

Though she waits for him to say he was in Beauclair not three months before she was, he keeps his silence. “Will you leave Kaer Moren for Midwinter?” he asks instead. 

With a glance at him, at the shadows playing their dance across his face, she answers, “Yes. But I’m scheduled in Kaedwen, so it isn’t far. By frost's melt, though, I need to be in Vizima. That’s more the difficulty, but Kasztan won’t let me down for speed. He’s quicker than Żyto.”

Geralt hmms, and tosses the last of the collected logs into the fire before hmming again. Even with a two year gap, his every movement and habit is seared into her. She can’t always guess what he’s thinking, but the rhythm of him is as much a part of her as her shadow. Between her and Yen was something he could never truly understand or touch, but likewise, he’s stitched into her soul in a way no one else can ever hope to be, whether the feeling is mutual or not. 

This is the issue with time following interrupted sleep: meandering thoughts turn philosophical, and for the worst. 

Seeking a reprieve, she searches the clearing they claimed as theirs for the night for a change in subject, and eventually, her attention lands back on Ciri. The girl’s tall for her age, already standing above Jaskier’s eye level, with the type of thinness that comes from youth and ancestral appearance rather than young childhood starvation. “Did I seem this young to you when we met?” she asks, brows knitting. “I was older, but not by _that_ much.” 

“You didn’t look it,” he says, mouth twitching. Then, more seriously, he adds, “The last few months haven’t been easy, but she was raised as a princess. It is different.”

Jaskier brushes a lock of pale hair from the girl’s face, tucking it behind her ear. “My name was Julia,” she says, focused on Ciri so she doesn’t need to look at him. “Julia Eliaszowska. My father was a fisherman. Char, mostly. He was a good one, too. But the lord the village was tenanted to demanded too much. No one ever had enough.” 

Perhaps it’s no wonder that after she left she systematically eliminated any indication of who or what she was. Her father had been a good man, but their life was not one that inherently inclined people towards that nature. There’s no telling what form Julia Eliaszowska may have taken, had she stayed, and maybe that’s the truth of it—why Jaskier went back all these many years later, why the guilt since then hasn’t ceased gnawing at her chest. Her family fills four paupers’ graves and her village is a monument to the effects of war, but still she can’t restrain the sneaking sense of gratefulness that misfortune befell them to set her free. 

Jaskier twists her hands in the fabric of her skirts, holding them upright to reveal her feet as she moves through the familiar footwork, singing, “ _Says he to the wee'wean, ‘A’ll see ye to yer home, bonnie lassie, dinna ken, the night is fair drawnin’ in.’_ ” The small cluster of children watch her with glassy-eyed wonderment, attention flitting from the sunshine glistening on her hair ribbons and dress’ scarlet embroidery to her quick moving feet. “Come on,” she says, stopping abruptly with a tap of her ankles. “It’s your shot now.” 

Today, she and Geralt and Ciri are a city that’s closer to a larger town on the border of Kaedwen and Redania, which would not have been a stop had they not taken the long route to avoid Rinde. Geralt is here for a contract about a misbehaving wraith, and Jaskier is here to perform for the mayor’s daughter’s birthday celebration tonight, the funds too urgent not to risk bringing Ciri back into civilianisation. To lessen the danger, they soaked her hair temporarily in ink, so the only reason she stands out now among Jaskier’s eager students is because she’s taller than the rest. She keeps quiet, as unlike Jaskier, she can’t maneuver her way through random peasant dialects (yet). 

But still, she seems pleased with herself when she works through a better imitation of Jaskier’s footwork than the rest. Raisa, a girl a head shorter than she with violently orange curls and a splash of oily red bumps on her nose, says, “Ach, it’s all canny for yerself, m’lady, but cannae go slower for us?”

“I amn’t needing you to go slower,” says Gal, her younger, but nearly identical sister, with a smile that reveals two missing front teeth. “I kent what you be doing.” 

“You both do,” Jaskier says, and resolutely does not look at Ciri, knowing she might laugh if she does. “You all do. You’re all just needing a wee bit more practice is all. Again?” 

With the cluster, she and Ciri while away almost an hour, before the tanner who owns the nearby shop steps outside his door to scare them from his territory. “Can we go to the river?” Ciri asks now that they’re alone, and her accent doesn’t draw a danger of unwanted questions.

When they reach it, Jaskier hops onto the low stone wall buffeting the water’s edge, and out holds her hand for the girl, but Ciri only shakes her head. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll fall?” she says, walking alongside Jaskier, who has her arms stretched as she moves with a cat’s gait down the ledge. “It’s so narrow.”

“I’ve got a steady balance,” she says and adds, as an afterthought, “When I put my mind to it. Your feet aren’t so unsteady either.”

“Really?” Ciri beams. “Can you teach me to dance, Jask? I mean, _real_ dancing. Fun dancing. Like what you do.”

“Is that something you would really want?” Jaskier asks, cocking her head in the girl’s direction. When Ciri reaffirms the request thrice over, Jaskier grins, too, and says, “Then as you wish. But it’s _imperative_ that we practice often, particularly when Geralt is around, because it’ll just drive him mad.”

The girl laughs. “That’s not very nice, you know,” she says, to which Jaskier points out that never once did she claim to be kind. 

Two hours before nightfall, Geralt returns, mud-streaked and scowling, to their room at the Red Hart, to find Ciri weaving flowers into Jaskier’s plaited hair with the fumbling almost-grace of any ordinary girl wishing too early to grow up.

In a wise woman’s lonely hut in the darkest reaches of Coed Du, a raggedy doll of a girl lies on a sweat-slick sleeping mat, struggling to live. Her every cough is a wet hack that shakes her bones, releasing lines of blood and phlegm. 

“What,” she tries. “What—” The rest of her question is quickly lost to a barking wheeze and sputter. Above her, the sunlight slanting through the herb-laden thatch roof is hazy, dusty golden upon arrival. The heat is unbearable. She sees the wise woman’s face, but the details of it slip from her each time she blinks. 

The woman smears a cloying paste across her chest. “Ych a fi, I know, child. Here’s lobeli and jaskierów with a dash of mięty pieprzowej. Now what can I be calling you?” 

“I,” the girl says, trying and failing to focus as she drowns in her lungs. Breathing is a chore not made easier by the poultice adhering to her skin. “Jaskier?” Even with her head pained into disorientation from fever, she still registers the peculiarity of _buttercups_ in a herbalists’ cure.

“Jaskier?” the woman repeats. She has wrinkles folded around blue eyes, but that recognition only lasts as long it takes for her to twist around. The snail shells and animal teeth on her necklace jangle. “I won’t be thinking that’s your name, mind, but it’s your name to me. Drink it slow, Jaskier. A vile thing it is, I know.”

She shoves the mug of steaming in tea in the girl’s face and down her throat before she can find the voice to protest. It _burns_ , blistering her from the heat and sparking from the herbs, the pain too intense for the following spoon of honey to soothe. This is it, she thinks as she tries and fails to draw air into her flooded lungs. I’m going to die from illness like my father in a foreign wood and no one will remember me. 

A sob bubbles up her throat, but when it bursts from it, it comes accompanied with a spiderweb of blood. The wise woman shushes her and pets a gnarled hand through her hair. “That’s a good girl,” she says. “Rest yourself, now. I’ll be here when you wake.” 

Later, when Jaskier wakes, her fever broken, the herbs are gone from the ceiling and the only furniture is the sleeping mat beneath her back. Beside her, placed atop her lute, is a bag of tea leaves and a single buttercup.

A glowing disk grows from the early dark, birthing a shining doorway from a pinprick to settle between the trees. Ciri barely has time to say, “What is—” before Yen, alive and whole and more disheveled than she has been in three lifetimes comes tumbling out. 

Geralt reaches Yennefer first, crouching to his knees to support her to her feet. There’s sand in her hair and branches snagged in a dress damp from recent rain; she’s gone through more than one portal to reach them, clearly. “Geralt?” she says, and a smile blooms slow and disbelieving across her face. She says nothing else before she drops her weight forward onto him, arms stretched out to grip around his neck, cheek pressed to shoulder. 

Across the campfire, Jaskier stands shock-still, seeing without comprehending the scene in front of her. This is a hallucination or a fever-vision or a dream about to turn into a nightmare. Geralt says, “Yennefer,” and Ciri, beside Jaskier, says, “ _You’re_ Yennefer? Jask—”

“Jask?” 

Then Yen is in front of her, purple eyes bright and wild, her hair a storm cloud waving around her head in the frosted breeze. She reaches out, but Jaskier flinches back with her fingers a hair’s width from her face. Abruptly, she realises she hasn’t breathed since she saw the portal form. In a distant sort of way, she hears Ciri say, “I don’t understand,” and Geralt’s indistinct answers. All Jaskier can see is Yen, her lips—cracked, dusted in dry blood—parted, her eyes wide, her face pale. Her hand hangs stationary, not connecting with Jaskier’s skin but close enough that she can feel the sense of _being touching_ regardless. A shiver runs through her. When finally she breathes, the inhale is a stutter that quivers her shoulders and knees.

At Geralt’s touch she flinches, too, but cobbles together an illusion of stability that allows him to lead her from beyond the clearing’s edge. Though he and the others exchange words, what they are doesn’t penetrate through the fog settling thick over Jaskier’s mind. 

“Jaskier,” he says, taking her folded arms by elbows to turn her towards him, “look at me—all right. I need you to breathe, Jask. Steady, in, out.” 

It’s difficult, but slowly, with his help, she forces her lungs back under her control, except then the fog lifts, and his efforts fall to dust when she dissolves into tears instead. “I’m sorry,” she says, humiliated by the quake in her voice. “I can’t—this doesn’t make—people don’t just—someone found me to tell me she was _dead_ and people don’t just—she said—”

Yen is at Geralt’s side again, materialising there as if formed from the forest’s shadows. “That was Tissania,” she says, eyeing Jaskier warily. “I told her where to find you in case I died. She didn’t know. _I_ didn’t know. I’m sorry. But I’m real. _This_ is real.”

When she doesn’t answer, Yen steps forward, ignoring Geralt’s sharp look, and wraps her hands around Jaskier’s, which she clutches together in front of her chest. The feeling is solid. Even if the dead have been known to walk, illusions and ghosts and night terrors cannot touch.

“You’re here?” 

“I’m here.”

Tomorrow will require stories told and questions answered, but for now, as the three of them fall into each other in sheltered darkness of the late autumn breeze, Jaskier is content to listen to them breath.

**Author's Note:**

> Hopefully the next one will come out soon.


End file.
